The New
Orleans-born, LSU-educated author Nic Pizzolatto
is enjoying enormous success just now as the creator of the locally shot HBO
series "True
Detective," but he's by no means resting on his laurels. Deadline
is reporting today that Pizzolatto's debut 2010 novel "Galveston" -- a
gritty crime tale set partly in New Orleans -- is now being adapted for the big
screen.

Belgian actor
Matthias Schoenaerts ("Bullhead,"
"Rust
and Bone") is set to star, with casting under way for the film's female
lead. Janus Metz ("Armadillo") is in line to direct from a script by Pizzolatto,
with Jean Doumanian ("August: Osage County") producing.

It has yet to
be announced where "Galveston" will shoot, but given the story's local
connections -- as well as the state's much-ballyhooed filmmaking tax incentives
-- one has to think a Louisiana shoot is likely. The project is eyeing a spring
start to production.

"Galveston"
tells the story of a low-level New Orleans criminal enforcer named Roy Cady who
-- after learning his boss wants him dead -- goes on the run on the eve of
2008's Hurricane Ike. Along for the ride: an 18-year-old woman named Rocky
Arceneaux, whom Cady rescued on his way out of town. Their travels take them
through the Louisiana-Texas border town of Orange, Texas -- a stone's throw
from Lake Charles, where Pizzolatto grew up -- and on to "the
battered seascape of Galveston's country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a
world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes."

Should the
project shoot locally, it will mark a return to Louisiana for Schoenaerts, who
shot the forthcoming thriller "The
Loft" in town with James Marsden, Eric Stonestreet, Karl Urban and
Wentworth Miller.